Suspect Search Is Wide Open and Baffling

As investigators edge closer to determining if the midair explosion of TWA Flight 800 was a criminal act, the attention of the world’s anti-terrorism community is irresistibly shifting to who might have done it--and why--if deliberate violence was indeed involved.

Within hours of the jet’s crash off New York’s Long Island on Wednesday, the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies launched the first phase of an informal inquiry across at least four continents, seeking possible links and motives in case such information should be needed, officials said Sunday.

But the initial search has spawned more bafflement and debate than firm leads among diverse American counter-terrorism outlets, law enforcement officials have said. The list of possible individuals and groups with either the capability or the motive to carry out aircraft sabotage is long. But virtually none is currently thought to have both those ingredients, basic to any crime.

“It’s wide open at this stage. A lot of it boils down to little more than guessing,” said one senior law enforcement official. “And even if we find out today that it was sabotage, there’s not likely to be anything to say for a very long time.”

U.S. officials are particularly sensitive about discussing early lines of inquiry because of the chance they could be wrong. In the investigation of the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, agents worldwide spent almost two years of a highly publicized probe on the wrong track before finally finding what is widely believed to be the right one.

Ultimately, part of a microchip, a tiny piece of a triggering device, led to two Libyan intelligence agents operating out of Malta who are suspected of putting a bomb-laden radio-tape player on a connecting flight. The microchip matched a triggering device found in the possession of two Libyan intelligence agents arrested with sophisticated plastic explosives at the Dakar, Senegal, airport 10 months before the Pan Am bombing.

If the TWA crash case does involve terrorism, it may be equally difficult to trace.

“This time there’s no obvious candidate for a possible perpetrator,” said former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Canistraro, who investigated the Pan Am 103 case.

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Those already considered span a wide range, from domestic militias, drug lords and Mafia operatives to assorted foreign terrorist groups in Asia, Europe and Africa and the perennial suspects, Islamic extremists. The last category has its own full spectrum of possibilities.

The FBI and intelligence agencies have begun their search because the early hours after an attack can be critical, as the United States painfully learned after the deadly 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York and the 1993 CIA shooting in Washington that killed two people. In both cases, Pakistani-born suspects managed to slip out of the country within the first 24 hours and disappear for a long time.

In the absence of any conclusive evidence on the sudden explosion of the TWA jet, much of the speculative inquiry has centered on reviewing electronic intercepts grabbed from the global airwaves and phone lines by the National Security Agency. Officials are also reviewing human surveillance information collected in New York and overseas and heightening intelligence efforts around possible suspects.

Many perpetrators of past attacks are not even on the list. A Sikh militant who checked in a suitcase bomb was arrested for the midair explosion that brought down an Air India 747 aircraft off the Irish coast in 1985, killing all 329 on board. But Sikh extremism is in remission and the conflict never spilled over into the United States.

Many regimes on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism also seem unlikely, experts said. “You can probably dismiss Syria, North Korea and Cuba, which either don’t have the clear motivation or the ability,” Canistraro said.

Few countries outside the Mideast are openly hostile or have an ax to grind with Americans, law enforcement officials said. “It’s limited to small players like the Serbs, who don’t have much of a capability,” said one official.

Domestic possibilities would also seem doubtful “in part because of motive,” a law enforcement official said. Militias angry at the U.S. government would get little out of sabotaging a civilian aircraft, he said.

Sabotaging a large American aircraft has not been a tactic of either the Mafia or drug lords.

As has been the case so often in the past, that leaves the likeliest candidates in the volatile Mideast, law enforcement officials said. Ten of the 22 airliner bombings since 1969 have been Mideast-related, according to Karen Gardela, who keeps a terrorism chronology at the Rand Corp. Five of those have been American planes.

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If the crash was caused by a bomb--Libya has proved it has the know-how and intent to merit suspicion--could its operatives function in the United States? And does it currently have a pressing motive? Despite the current punishing sanctions imposed by the United States on the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi--because Libya refuses to hand over the two Pan Am 103 suspects for prosecution--law enforcement officials said they are skeptical on both counts.

Another possibility is Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing who is now on trial in New York for plotting to blow up Delta, Northwest and United flights in the Far East. (His trial in the World Trade Center attack begins this fall). The Iraqi-born Yousef is accused of carrying the ingredients of a bomb aboard a Philippines Airways plane and assembling it in a toilet. He allegedly got off the plane, and the bomb exploded while the craft traveled between the Philippines and Japan, killing a teenager and wounding 14 people.

But he is in jail and his bomb was small--at least by the standards of what would have been needed to create the kind of fireball described by eyewitnesses to the Flight 800 explosion.

“This does not look like Yousef. If this was a bomb, it was not nitroglycerin smuggled on by a passenger. It was too big,” Canistraro said.

Others disagreed. Law enforcement officials said they have been concerned about people trained or influenced by Yousef who they believe are still underground. Authorities have said Yousef built at least four different cells--in the United States, in Manila, in Bangkok, Thailand, and among the Afghan-trained Arabs and Pakistanis with whom he lived for years.

And Yousef perfected a system using a simple watch that could time a bomb to go off any time during a whole year. “The circle around Yousef has to be wider,” a law enforcement official said. But that is hardly something specific to go on.

Iraq and Iran are also possibilities, law enforcement officials said. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who has been militarily defeated, economically crippled and politically humiliated by a U.S.-led coalition of nations, is known to thirst for revenge. His government has made bellicose threats since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But again, some law enforcement officials wonder about his ability to pull off such an attack because a host of other plots he sponsored were foiled during the Gulf War, when he had more allies, more clout and greater resources.

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Iran also is a consideration because of a call this year by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) seeking $18 million in intelligence funds to help overthrow that country’s regime and new sanctions punishing foreign companies for doing business with Tehran, officials said.

Washington and several Persian Gulf regimes have also charged the Islamic republic with meddling in their affairs and supporting branches of the militant Islamic group Hezbollah, reflecting a more aggressive posture, law enforcement officials said. And Iran’s intelligence agency has been involved in reconnaissance of American targets abroad, including in Saudi Arabia, in the past year, Pentagon officials said.

But Tehran has in recent years primarily limited its covert operations to attacks on its own dissidents abroad, mainly in Europe, Turkey and the Far East.

“Sabotaging an American aircraft in the United States is probably even a bit too ambitious for Iran,” Canistraro said.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah is another with a long list of anti-American acts and grievances. It is widely suspected of operating abroad, and is linked with the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina in 1994. It has also been tied to airplane hijackings in the Middle East.

But sabotage of the magnitude required to down a 747 flying out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport would be something new in its arsenal, law enforcement officials said.

Indeed, one of the few preliminary suppositions FBI and intelligence officials are making is that if the crash of Flight 800 was an act of terrorism, it marks a significant escalation in the capabilities of either an individual or a group.

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The lack of a clear public claim of responsibility for the crash has told investigators little about a possible terrorist link. Some Mideast groups have made claims in the past after an attack while others have not. After the TWA crash, U.S. authorities said there were two calls claiming responsibility but said neither was known to be credible.

The evidence in the TWA disaster could also present a problem. The microchip that led to the perpetrators in the Pan Am bombing was found only after searchers spent days crawling on their hands and knees over the crash site. Law enforcement officials said the chances of finding minute pieces of evidence on the ocean floor are remote.

FBI Seeking Information

The FBI has established a toll-free telephone number (1-888-245-4636) as well as an e-mail address (newyork@fbi.gov) for anyone to use to offer information about the crash.